One study is the whole basis for almost everything anyone says about the size of Accra’s economy. It is worth knowing exactly what it says, because it gets quoted far more confidently than it deserves.
The one real figure
The UN Economic Commission for Africa with the Accra Metropolitan Authority, 2021 put Greater Accra at 34 to 39% of Ghana’s entire economy between 2015 and 2020, with output per person roughly 3 times the national average. Within that, services were about 63% and manufacturing 20.5%.
Set against the population figures, that is the entire story of Ghanaian economic geography in one line: about 16.8% of the people producing 34 to 39% of the output.
It is a range over a period, not a series
That study reports a band across several years. It does not publish a figure for 2016, or 2019, or last year, and nothing else does either. So there is no chart of Accra’s GDP on this site, and you should be suspicious of anyone who shows you one.
Why Ghana has no regional GDP series
The Ghana Statistical Service publishes national accounts — GDP, sector breakdowns, growth — for Ghana. It does not publish them as an annual series for each of the sixteen regions.
That is not an oversight, it is genuinely hard. To split GDP by region you have to decide where output happens rather than where it is booked, and a bank headquartered in Ridge with branches in every region defeats that immediately. Countries that do publish regional accounts spend a great deal of effort on it.
The practical consequence for this site: there is no Accra inflation rate, no Accra unemployment rate, no Accra GDP growth. Where you see one quoted, it is almost always a national figure that has lost its label.
— How to read Ghanaian statistics
The national picture, clearly labelled as national
Ghana’s economy, from the World Bank series:
| 1960 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| GDP | $1.2 billion | $114.2 billion |
| GDP per person | $174.9 | $3,257 |
That is not 93.8 times richer
Both rows are in current US dollars, which means each year is measured in that year’s prices and that year’s exchange rate. Most of the apparent increase is sixty-five years of global inflation and a cedi that has moved a very long way against the dollar. Real growth per person over the period is a fraction of what the raw multiple suggests.
This is the single most common way GDP figures mislead, and it is why the growth-rate series below is the more honest one to read.
Growth, and the two years worth knowing
GDP growth was 5.95% in 2025. The extremes tell you more:
- -12.43% in 1975 — the worst year in the series, in the middle of the long decline that ended with the economic collapse of the early 1980s.
- 14.05% in 2011 — the year commercial oil production from the Jubilee field showed up in the accounts.
Between those two, Ghana went from one of the sharpest post-independence declines on the continent to one of the faster-growing economies in it.
Exports and the shape of the economy
Exports were 28.19% of GDP in 1960, peaked at 48.8% in 2000, and were 35.06% in 2024.
Gold, cocoa and oil dominate that. None of them are produced in Greater Accra — but they are financed, shipped, taxed, insured and argued about here, which is exactly why Accra’s share of output is so much larger than its share of population.
The unemployment figure is the one to distrust
Measured unemployment was 2.98% in 2025, having peaked at 10.46% in 2000.
Read plainly, 2.98% would be close to full employment. Nobody in Accra believes that, and they are right not to.
The definition is the problem. To be unemployed you must have done no paid work in the reference period and be actively looking. Someone selling sachet water in traffic for a few cedis a day is employed by that definition. In an economy where — on the 2021 census — 66% of workers in a typical Greater Accra district are in informal work, rising to 85% in the highest district, the unemployment rate is measuring something close to the wrong thing.
Underemployment and low pay are the real conditions, and this series does not capture either.
— Informal work by district, on the map — Employee rights in Ghana
Using this to make a decision
If you are choosing where to open something, the national aggregates are close to useless and the district data is not. The map carries the 2021 census by assembly, and the viability checker ranks all 29 of them against the requirements of a particular trade.
— Business viability checker — Entrepreneurship in Accra — Inflation and the cedi — What living in Accra costs
National series from World Bank Open Data, fetched 2026-09-10. Accra’s share of GDP from the UN Economic Commission for Africa with the Accra Metropolitan Authority, 2021.